Live Deeply and Richly

Most of us spend too much time on the surface of life.  We tell ourselves we don’t have enough time to go deeply, or we’re too confused and don’t know the answers, or simply that it’s too much to deal with. Mostly, though, I think it’s about not knowing how to deal with our feelings. But here’s the trouble with that: our life becomes flat and dull. We miss out on all the richness of living deeply. Sure, sometimes that richness is cloaked in pain and heartache, but living deeply is where the juiciness is. It’s where the lusciousness of our everyday lives is.

A friend of mine shared with me about a very scary health issue she recently dealt with. How in the world, I wondered, does one cope with something like that; one day you’re ‘you’ and the next day you’re thrown into the abyss of darkness and fear? She said that from that point on, she knew that everything about her life had to shift. She learned to let go of all that wasn’t essential to her, and bring to her all that was.

She told me how she learned to go deep into the pain and fear and embrace it. Embrace it, she clarified, not wallow in it. Wallowing brings on a ‘poor me/why me’ mentality, while embracing takes one into the richness of the experience. As she described how she embraced her journey into the unknown, I felt the hair on my arms prickle (that’s when I know I am hearing something important—go figure). I began to realize that she was able to live fully and richly not in spite of her condition, or because of her condition, but simultaneously alongside of her condition.

Few of us have been spared some sort of gut wrenching heartbreak in our life. Most of us look back and recognize the beauty we were able to eke out of that experience. That’s the embrace that I’m referring to. Learning to live deeply in the now will give you the richness right now, not later.

Living deeply and richly does not protect you from pain, or illness, or loss; but it does seem to protect you from fear. Sometimes stuff happens. Accepting what you’re given is more about attitude that anything else. You can choose to run and hide from life and live a flat existence, or you can embrace all that you’re given—the good the bad and the ugly—and live fully and deeply. Quiet those ‘yeah buts’ in your mind and breathe in all the richness that life is offering you right now. It’s your choice, it’s your life; how will you live it?